settler colonial studies blog

Settling on area studies: Jon Solomon, ‘Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism’, in Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, Peter Button (eds), Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana, Routledge, 2023

28May23

Abstract: In the covenant around technological fetishism married to an aesthetic ideology of global transition, one detects the model of an unwritten social contract concerning global population management. This social contract is enjoined around the founding exclusions of race and class with which the fields of East Asian, and particularly China, studies have never reckoned to this day. In other words, the intelligibility of East Asian area studies becomes politically legible only as the palimpsest of white settler colonialism’s transformation into creedal nationalism without going through a process of decolonization. Postwar US creedal nationalism can only be fully understood from the perspective of the “Area Studies Social Pact” emblematized by Lucian Pye and Erik Erikson. Under cover of being devoted to the production of knowledge, Area Studies is, in truth, an apparatus for imperial population management.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonialism is so instagrammable: Carrie Karsgaard, ‘Resistance to the Trans Mountain Expansion in a Settler Colonial Context’, in Carrie Karsgaard, Instagram as Public Pedagogy: Online Activism and the Trans Mountain Pipeline, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 21-74

28May23

Abstract: Across homelands of interconnected life, the Trans Mountain pipeline is being installed according to colonial decision-making that disregards Indigenous sovereignty and instead supports state investments in Canada’s resource economy. Indeed, while the pipeline results in destructive ecological impacts, pipeline politics—and their expressions over Instagram—are more nuanced and complex than environmentalism alone can explain. At material, representational, and ideological levels, the Trans Mountain intersects with colonial nation-building narratives that naturalize resource extraction and transport to the detriment of many entwined ecosystems, communities, and Indigenous nations. In detailing the pipeline in relation to Canada’s nature as a settler colonial state, this chapter, therefore, not only provides meaningful contextual information about the pipeline and its resistance on Instagram but also situates the pipeline issue in relation to settler colonialism more broadly, laying the groundwork for an examination of resistant pipeline public pedagogy toward the transformation of settler colonial relations.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonialism in the north: Mathias Danbolt, Bart Pushaw, ‘Institutional Acknowledgements: Introduction to the Special Issue “The Art of Nordic Colonialism”‘, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 2023

25May23

Excerpt: Markerna marks one of the first attempts to introduce the practice of land acknowledgements in art institutions in Sápmi – and as such, it also marks an early attempt to frame the relationship between the institution and the land it operates on, as one defined by settler colonialism. The concept of settler colonialism has gained traction over the last few years as an analytical framework to address the nation states of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s claims of sovereignty over Sámi land, culture, and rights. The work of Sámi philosopher Rauna Kuokkanen on “Nordic settler colonialism” has been especially important in this regard. While a theoretical discussion of the framework of settler colonization is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that colonialism and settler colonialism represent different, although related and often co-existing, modalities of political and cultural domination. Whereas colonialism is often used to describe the organized exploitation of people and resources by a foreign people in colonies established at a distance from the “homeland”, settler colonialism, by contrast, is not structured around a “master-servant relationship” based on ethnic difference. The main object of settler colonization is the control of land and territories through population, thus it is a regime “not [of] exploitation but replacement”, as Patrick Wolfe has argued.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The poetics of settler colonialism: Kyle Kohinga, ‘”Soil Is a Toil Needing All to Recoil”: Lionel Fogarty, Andrew Forrest, and the Settler-Colonial Georgic’, Australian Literary Studies, 38, 1/2, 2023

23May23

Abstract: Lionel Fogarty’s difficult, urgent verse is universally accepted as an ‘activist poetry’, yet the very axiomatic nature of this characterisation has ironically obviated critical engagement with Fogarty’s experimentalist poetry as it emerges from specific protest – as a response to, and analysis of, the particular, contemporaneous, shifting injustices faced by Aboriginal people. Proposing to bring the interpretative frame of activism to bear anew upon Fogarty’s work, this essay reads Fogarty’s ‘No Cites like the Cites Hum In’ (‘Written Land’ 2016) as a timely language of judicial and poetic intervention – one itself seeking to intervene on another, restless language of intervention – that of settler lawmaking. It considers how Fogarty’s poem enacts a ‘decolonisative’ critique of the settler poeticisation of toil operationalised by Fortescue Mining Group CEO Andrew Forrest in his 2014 report on Indigenous employment and training programs, ‘Creating Parity’. Fogarty’s poem, it argues, reckons with the centrality of a ‘battlerist’ mythos to the settler-state’s specific, contemporary, neoliberal efforts to not only expropriate Aboriginal land, but also to discipline and pathologise Aboriginal bodies. This essay demonstrates how ‘No Cites like the Cites Hum In’ provides a poignant analysis of the way settler law, time and labour regimes function together to desiccate and enervate the distinct temporal subjectivities underpinning Aboriginal political imaginaries. It contends that a stronger poetic and philosophical appreciation of Fogarty’s verse is gained from understanding it in its relation to extraliterary Aboriginal struggles.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler completion now? (debating the Indigenous voice to the Australian parliament) Murray Goot, Tim Rowse, ‘The Debate Over the Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians: National Unity and Memories of the 1967 Referendum’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2023

23May23

Excerpt: In the debate over constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians since 2010, the high “Yes” vote in 1967 has been recalled as a benchmark of national unity and goodwill towards Indigenous Australians, something to which Australians must return. The 1967 referendum has been evoked as a “step” towards reconciliation, with constitutional recognition presented as the next step. The “recognition” that the 1967 referendum enabled has been (mis)represented as allowing Indigenous Australians to be counted in the Census, hence to “count” more generally. Explaining constitutional changes to voters in the referendum on an Indigenous Voice, “Yes” and “No” campaigns are likely to describe amendments in emotively powerful terms. False memories of “recognition” obscure a political fissure within the myth of 1967. Some who celebrate 1967 have wanted the Constitution to continue to distinguish Indigenous from nonIndigenous Australians, one understanding of the 1967 amendment to Section 51(xxvi); others have hoped that the next referendum would complete the deletion of distinguishing words that had begun in 1967 with the repeal of Section 127. The myths of 1967 combine to accommodate opposing ideals of national “unity”, allowing protagonists in the debate to read the “lessons” of 1967 in ways that reinforce their own political perspectives.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Studious settlers? Hijin Parka, Margot Francis, ‘Fraught subjects: decolonial approaches to racialized international students as “settlers of colour in the making”‘, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

23May23

Abstract: This paper contributes to migration studies, settler colonial studies and critical internationalization studies by mapping as connected two concurrent settler colonial preoccupations, reconciliation and internationalization. In Canada, as in other Western countries, international students are a crucial resource as they increasingly sustain post-secondary funding. At the same time, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) has charged the educational sector to put reconciliation and decolonization at the heart of their mandate. Drawing on interviews with racialized international students in Ontario, Canada, this paper examines how racialized international students may have complex relationships to coloniality and be complicit in legitimating settler colonialism. We argue that the processes of reconciliation and internationalization must be understood as deeply interconnected especially because the obfuscation of coloniality is a key technology of settler rule.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Prairie Jewish settlers: John C. Lehr, ‘Rabbi Eliezer Gruber’s Jewish Agricultural Settlement Schemes in Manitoba’, Prairie History, 10, 2023, pp. 20-32

23May23

Excerpt: The most imposing mausoleum in Winnipeg’s Shaarey Zedek cemetery is dedicated to a Rabbi virtually unknown within the wider Jewish community. Eliezer (spelled variously as Elezor, Leizer, Leiser, Alezor, or Eleizer) Gruber was a Jewish leader and settlement entrepreneur who, at the turn of the last century, played a significant role in founding Manitoba’s first Jewish agricultural settlement.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Go back where they did not come from! Karl Gardner, ‘Indigenous Anti/ Deportation: Contesting Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Belonging in Canada and Australia’, Social & Legal Studies, 2023

23May23

Abstract: This article focuses on attempts by settler colonial states to deport Indigenous non-citizens. The concept of “Indigenous anti/deportation” is introduced to capture both the inseparability of deportation from its contestation, as well as the unique stakes involved in contesting the imminent deportation of members of Indigenous communities. Comparing cases in Canada and Australia, Indigenous anti/deportation highlights fundamentally divergent claims of sovereignty, the assertion of Indigenous citizenship orders, and a transformation of how belonging is understood in contexts of settler colonial occupation. This article concludes by considering the implications of cases of Indigenous anti/deportation for future struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and for solidarity-building between migrants and Indigenous peoples.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler recreation: Robert Vranich, ‘Beyond Preservation and Use: National Parks and Settler Colonialism in Western Canada, 1880s–1930s’, Prairie History, 10, 2023, pp. 5-19

23May23

Excerpt: Canada’s national parks system originated in western Canada. On 25 November 1885, a week after authorities executed Louis Riel for his role in the North-West Resistance, and about two weeks after railway financier Donald Smith hammered in the Last Spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservative government reserved approximately 26 square kilometres of forested land around the hot mineral springs near Banff Station, in present-day Alberta.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The abilities of settlers: Leah Wiener, Enabling Settler Citizens: Disability, Age, Public Health, and Settler Colonialism in Northern Ontario, 1876-1951, Simon Fraser University, 2023

23May23

Abstract: My dissertation analyzes the relationship between public health and settler colonialism, employing age and ability as key categories of analysis. I argue that settler colonialism and public health were constitutive of one another. Public health policy weaves together notions about land, race, labour, age, and ability, to structure and stratify societies. Public health relied on white supremacist tropes to justify the state’s attempts to subjugate and dispossess the Anishinaabeg in Northern Ontario. The idea of a “public” was critical and contested in the intersection of policy and the emerging social science of public health. Settler standards of public imagined a “public” that was white, male, middle-class, and adult, with a body that could be made healthy through individual effort. Settler ideas about Indigenous Peoples shaped the “public” as a racialized and age-stratified concept in Canadian public health and health policy. In this dissertation, I seek to highlight how material and symbolic age, and material and symbolic children, figured in settler-colonial processes of state formation in the context of public health policies. I examine how bureaucrats and institutions in the public and voluntary sectors constructed and portrayed Indigenous and settler health, measuring each against a middle-class standard of “public” health. To do this, I set forth four interconnected arguments. First, settler colonialism and settler public health policy were mutually constitutive. Second, disability existed alongside and entangled with age as a key framing for settler public health policies. Third, these public health policies drew from a bifurcated notion of the “public,” resulting in policies focused on protection and surveillance based on racialized lines. Finally, these framings of disability, age, and the “public” had clear material impacts in Northern Ontario’s settler colonial context, enabling settlement while dispossessing Indigenous Peoples.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute